Thursday, July 19, 2012

More on the Bulgarian terrorist explosion

We now have a final figure of those killed: five Israelis, the Bulgarian bus driver and one terrorist. The last one has been named by the Bulgarian media as Mehdi Ghezali, though when this went to press there was no independent confirmation. The story came from somewhere, though.

Ghezali was reportedly a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Following a lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, Guantanamo authorities recommended Ghezali be transferred to another country for continued detainment, and he was handed over to Swedish authorities in 2004.

The Swedish government did not press charges.
He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali was born in Stockholm in 1979. He is the son of an Algerian immigrant and a Finnish woman. He finished secondary studies in 1999 and trained as a welder.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then he traveled to Portugal, supposedly to pursue a career as a Football player. Ghezali was apprehended by the Portuguese Police in Algarve, on 07/31/1999, for a suspected bank robbery and a jewelry theft.
Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali and his partner were sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment, but were released early. Ghezali was released from prison on 06/12/2000, after having spent 10 months in a Portuguese prison, and returned to Sweden (his father claimed that Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali went to Algeria to serve in the Algerian Army).

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then traveled to Medina, Saudi Arabia, to study at the university. However, he was not accepted and returned to Sweden in 04/2001 for a brief period before travelling to London where he studied at the Madrasa of the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad. He then travelled to Pakistan in the summer of 2001 in order to study at one of the Madrasas situated there. After failing to gain acceptance into any of the Madrasas he then travelled to Afghanistan, where he according to his own statements stayed with a family in Jalalabad.

You can also see him on the video if you scroll down. We are assuming this is the right guy.

6 comments:

The Swedish security police (SÄPO) has denied the press reports from Bulgaria that Mehdi Ghezali (although they never menion his name) is the suicide terrorist.

They should know since they were tasked with "keeping an eye" on him after he was released from Guantanamo. However, as you may have noted above, they missed his little holiday in Afghanistan 2009. :-(

The Swedish police - no. The Bulgarian authorities apparently have DNA samples and possibly fingerprints of the suspect. The material has been sent to the US for analysis. Also a forged driver's ID from Michigan has been found. Some superficial similarity similarity to M Ghezali, but that's all so far.

Interesting to note - and I am sure you won't be surprised - the utmost decorum showed by the Swedish media outlets. Not one of them has mentioned Mehdi Ghezali's name or the fact that the man had been a prisoner at Gitmo. No, he is the "Swedish man falsely suspected", or "the man erroneously pointed out by the Bulgarians". If you haven't got access to the net or are totally devoid of imagination you would never have guessed who they referred to....

BTW, these are the same newspapers that last year gleefully published a photo of our king visiting a porno club; a photograph that soon turned out to be a very amateurish photoshop work. So glad they have learned from their mistakes......./sarc.

Anyway, for the time being "the Swedish man who was falsely accused" has not appeared. Guess the summer temps didn't have his address.

PS: Just in case you wonder we are not lacking islamist terrorists here in our northern abode. Mehmed Ghezali's friend Munir Awad and 3 companions have recently been convicted to long prison sentences in Denmark for taking part in an attempted lethal attack on Jyllands Posten of the Mo-cartoons fame.

A Swedish man (hmm...) Atris Hussein of Lebanese descent is standing trial in Thailand for preparing a terror attack against tourists - probably Israeli ones, and two weeks ago another man of Lebanese descent with a Swedish passport was arrested in Cyprus for spying on Israeli tourists. Apparently the latter, although claiming innocence, has admitted ties to Hezbollah.

Bus bomber was not Bulgarian, minister saysBy REUTERS07/20/2012 12:33BURGAS, Bulgaria - The man who blew up a bus carrying Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian airport, killing himself and six others, was not Bulgarian, the country's interior minister said on Friday.

"We are talking about a person that is not a Bulgarian citizen," Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told a news conference, adding Bulgaria was working with two other unnamed countries to identify the bomber.

(That leaves a number of unanswered questions, but let's see what happens.)